There were five two-hour sessions of the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints this past weekend, all of them watched from home.

Which means I could knit.

And boy did I have something I wanted to knit. I’d spent all week sure I had a particular yarn but completely unable to find it, not in the place it was supposed to be and not in the places it wasn’t supposed to be and I just couldn’t knit anything else till I’d gotten it out of my head and made real on my needles. Which wasn’t happening.

Till Friday night. At which point the little hide-and-seeker jumped out yelling PEEKABOO! It had fallen behind. I cast on and did the first row to get the chore part of it done so that in the morning it would just be the good part.

Because.

Sunday a week ago, they’d decided at church that with new people moving in, people needed to get to know each other. So they’d set up chairs in circles of about a dozen and handed everybody a sheet of paper with a list of questions to ask each other. There were two sets.

I groaned to myself because this is the kind of thing where it’s all white noise to me. Lots of people in the room talking at once means that the weak-to-me higher pitches of the consonants are obliterated by the decibel level of the rest.

Hmm. How’s that battery…not too bad… I pulled up the app on my phone and asked Haylee next to me if she’d be willing and explained how to use it: for it to pick up what you say, it can do it in this noisy environment but you have to put it right to your face and you have to keep this button pressed while you talk.

I didn’t say, and if you let go of the button and then push it again it erases everything.

I had become a tad reluctant to ask people to use it. They don’t get it. They let go of the button. They hold the phone at the distance they want to. It stares back at them with its initial little prompt unchanged and then they think it doesn’t work.

Haylee, whom I barely know, immediately grokked the whole thing–and not only how to use the app but how the situation was for me. She not only used it to help me hear her, she used it to tell me what everybody else in the group was saying, repeating softly rightupclosetoit.

I took careful note of the colors in the pattern on her skirt. I knew I had that in Rios. I had just finished the afghan and I couldn’t wait to do this next.

Five days. But finally I found it.

So: Conference. (Which had given me a week’s grace period on this.) GO!

I cast off during the last session.

Even the ends are run in now.

Note to myself, and anyone else potentially following this later should know that I am an exceedingly loose knitter: 90 st, US 6, two half-repeats of 10-stitch fern lace, then an M1 in the single stitch dividing them, two more half-repeats, another M1 and then continue from there. Probably should have done it again and taken it from 1 to 4, but it was all a doodle anyway. Maybe next time. I just didn’t want to make it floppy-wide at the bottom, but I don’t think I needed to worry.

It sits in ever-larger folds down the front, not too tight at the bottom nor too loose at the top and I really really like how it came out. I cannot wait to surprise her with it.

She laughed and laughed when I told her I’d set a timer for heading out and the gadget had heard wrong and apparently thought I was going to a farmer’s market: it displayed a tall basket of vegetables with the kale on top in the place of honor. Go see kale! Huzzah! Music and tossing veggies at the bell!

Because Gail is moving away and found herself with a party thrown in her honor. Several men lifted her wheelchair up the two steps to the door. She doesn’t weigh much anymore.

I finally got to meet her daughter who’d knitted her that gorgeous top-down sweater with the lace-leaf yoke–and Gail was wearing it tonight. Ruth’s sweater was gorgeous, too, and when she found out I was a knitter too we were instant friends.

The resident dog, a spaniel, walked through the crowd with a gentle wag of its tail but not eager to pick out one stranger from many for it to pay attention to.

Richard brought her a plate of strawberries per her request.

Gail lost her husband decades ago (to a terrible medical mistake that should never have happened) and I found myself saying to Ruth, I remember your dad.

That’s all I needed to say. She was so grateful.

Her mom, about the age of my own, will now be in walking distance so she can keep a good eye on her care rather than from a two hour flight away.

It was so good to see them and to get a chance to say goodbye. I snapped a picture.

And looked at it. And showed it to Gail. And then offered a do-over and she laughed and laughed again because that’s Gail and said thank you and meant it and yes please let’s and leaned back towards Aly and we got her a better send-off that time.

My phone number’s going to be the same, she made sure I knew.

My email’s on the card I wrote, I told her.

A hug and then another for safekeeping and Richard and I stepped away into the night, knowing just how badly we were going to miss her.

I was standing just past the top of the stairs at the entrance to the museum, chatting with the security guard. I was waiting for my friend Jean: the last time I’d seen her, we were in high school.

He told me about meeting up with old friends from high school; some you do, some, it just never seems to happen, but the friends you made are friends forever.

I very much agreed  with that last part.

Then he said he’d graduated five years ago. I smiled and told him, I’m 66.

And wondered out loud if I would recognize her. I’d given her a description of what I was wearing just in case, but that was all silliness because of course the moment we saw each other I exclaimed to the guard, There she is!

The smile on his face for us was as big as our own.

Her brother was with her and he toured the museum while we found a cozy spot and caught up on things. There was nobody else in that room but the echoes of our words and our memories.

Favorite teachers. Classmates gone now, ones still here, who had I seen, whom had she seen. Katherine: yes! Both of us got to see Katherine, one of the most fearless people I know, a USAID worker willing to go into any country any time.

Who thankfully was stateside visiting her mom when that entity got broadsided by a proverbial Cybertruck with no brakes, but anyway.

Such a good time. We took pictures. We stood in front of a sculpture in bright yellow of two letters: depending on which side you stood, they cheerfully called out, YO! Or… oy.

Needs a J, I said, as her brother raised his camera.

The first talk at church today was by a young man whose American family had lived in Eastern Europe for part of his childhood.

He was talking about the life of Jesus.

How his parents had fled their country under the violence of an edict to kill all baby boys under the age of two. How, when that leader died, they had at last returned home to their own country.

But how much did he ever really feel it was, and how much did the people there ever regard him as theirs, and as the speaker said that I suddenly saw how he could see that question in a way the rest of us would not have. Then he asked: Wouldn’t that have made it easier for him to willingly thwart oppressive leaders himself.

I had never thought of that.

The second speaker, someone I’ve known for years, kind of interrupted herself to make an aside re something that had been weighing heavily on her: how people–good people–people she’d loved and known and respected–had come to show a, a, (she searched for words, not wanting to tear down and knowing that people only truly change when they feel loved, not dissed) a… mean streak… that was so unexpected.

She said it near tears with so much love for them, in pain and wanting better for them, that they could not have denied the gift her words were offering them. There was a way out from that.

She is a lawyer and loves the rule of law and holding all people equal before God and man.

There were a very few in that audience who needed to hear that message and many more who were intensely relieved to hear Love Thy Neighbor given voice and attention. Intention. Towards all.

Because if we don’t have that what is left to us? But we do have it, we do, and we must.

(Photos coming.) We decided to make it one last day of yarn-shop hopping for the official Crawl. We might actually pull off a Bingo on our cards that they stamped each time we walked into a new one–and we did.

I packed the snacks. Nina drove. Again. Patterns and all that.

Having wished again and again during the afghan that I hadn’t used up all of this shade or that previously, I had my eye out for the ones I’d wanted to replace.

When we called it a day after Royal Bee, our husbands met up with us on the coast for dinner. They asked us, So: did you buy any yarn? with both of them cracking up, like, oh, no, they would never do such a thing in such a place.

My answer was, it averaged out to a skein per shop. It was fun to find colors I loved in the yarn I wanted–but the point was to spend time with Nina.

She laughed as she was nodding yes to that.

We were at Barbara’s Fishtrap. Nina and I had compared memories of Ivar’s in Seattle so I had to try a small bowl of the clam chowder to see if it was as good as theirs. The answer is, I’d have to try them side by side to tell because Barbara’s was very very very good, too, enough to make it all that I’d want to order the next time. It’s a tie. Best I’ve ever had, both of them.

There were surfers in the famous Mavericks surf whom we passed coming and going, there was the point of land stretching around the cove behind us (if you click on their link and scroll down, we were by that window in the center of the building), and at the top of that hill was a bulbous–

–I said, “Looks like a baby rattle.”

They did a double take at the water tower off in the distance and cracked up.

Edited to add: the note on the sign says, “If you are Grouchy, Sullen, Ornery, Moody, or Just Plain Mean, There is a $20 surcharge for having to put up with you.”

(I have no idea why it’s cropping this, click to see the whole thing. It’ll go sideways, though. Go figure.)

I wound up the last hank of Matisse Blue of that dye lot and then I’m out and we’re done. The seed stitch border will take a chunk of it.

I started a fish over here, some seaweed over there, and (where’s the purple. Found the purple) that should also start about there, and then those will probably be the last of the fish, unless (let’s see how much blue there is left at that point) I start one over there….

Three rows in, suddenly I felt like, nope. Put it all away. Picked up a hat and added a few more inches to it, wanting something where I didn’t have to plan and I didn’t have to envision and I didn’t have to make any decisions, just sit there and knit and think how someone was really going to like a gray hat after this was done and it will be fun to find out who and wouldn’t it be great to actually *finish* something.

I did not finish it.

And I baked snacks. Because tomorrow Nina and I are off doing the Bay Area Yarn Crawl thing again.

Yesterday’s yarn purchases. I don’t usually buy chunky, but when you have a granddaughter whose favorite outfit is, to quote her mother, “rainbow leopard sparkle” and you find some Urth yarn like the one on the left, well there you go.

Just got back from celebrating the anniversary of old friends of ours. Their kids flew into town, we got to catch up with them all–I went to college with one of them–and I took the youngest aside and told him,

You changed everything.

I what?

I told him, I argued with that feeling that I should knit for you, going, I can’t knit for everybody who ever compliments my stuff, there’s only one of me and there would be no end of it, I mean, c’mon!

The feeling was so insistent (and he knew the end of that story. It was a vest. A Kaffe Fassett vest, with him at 15 picking out all the colors for it in disbelief as I egged him on to choose more because I knew he wanted to) and his reaction had been so intensely grateful that I’d wanted to be a part of that again. I wanted to knit for other people again. You did that, I said. I’d kept a running list for awhile of the people I had knit for after that and at 182 went, That’s not what it’s about–ditch this. And that had been about 20 years ago.

I thanked him again for changing my life.

His foster/adoptive parents were celebrating their 70th anniversary. Good folks.

She turned into a parking lot driveway while I was going, No, the road is right there! (Up ahead.)

Her: Did you see the turkeys?

Me: What turkeys?

She pulled the car around to where I could see, for the first time I can ever remember, wild turkeys. Right up close. One took a step towards my camera and turned his head: Did you get my good side?

I’m heading out with Nina in the morning to play first day of the Bay Area Yarn Crawl. (Had I ever been to this LYS in Morgan Hill? No. This other one in San Carlos? Never heard of it somehow. Well then we will discover them.)

But first I wound the skein of green Manos Silk Blend that she brought me back from Uruguay last month as, y’know, kind of a yarn vaccine–and because I owe it to her to have it ready to cast on. Pretty stuff.

But I promise you we will succumb to the wool fumes just the same.

I took photos of two dye lot numbers to see if I can match them–you know how doubtful that is, but it has happened before and hey, you never know.

As I sit here remembering back in the days of random phone calls from investor types dialing into our area code and not having the least clue that it was in a time zone three hours off from theirs. …The email I’d sent off to a LYS, including my number. To make it easier for them? To make the inquiry feel more legitimate a reason for them to spend their time looking at all those little yarn tags? I can only guess now.

And my husband waking groggily up at dark o’clock, shoving the phone across that I had not in my sleep heard ringing, and going, “It’s your boiler-room yarn pushers in New York City. They want you to know they don’t have your dye lot.”

It’s been a running joke here ever since.

They were calling before opening the store in order to catch me before I might head off to work. It was very kind of them. They could simply have ignored me, but they were trying to be as helpful as they could as fast as they could and get that info to me so I would know to keep trying.

So let me see what I can do tomorrow.

If I don’t find it, maybe they have more of that Rios in New York City.

They haven’t had one in a long time that I can think of but there was a craft night at church tonight: bring whatever and get together.

I asked the organizer to text me the night of because I wanted to go but I knew I would forget. Which I did. And she did. I thanked her. I wore a mask: I knew she’d just had her last cancer treatment.

A few card tables were pulled out for watercoloring on. Two people were crocheting large afghans. I had my fish. One woman was sewing some appliqué, the project mostly folded up so you couldn’t really see anything but the flower at hand.

I asked to see it.

The whole thing laid out was revelatory–it was a stunning work of art.

She’d had no idea I knit. I know, right?

One friend asked me to spread my afghan out so she could see the whole thing. She knew me enough to say, And you just knit it, right, no pattern? Art is like that: it tells you where it wants to go.

It’s the boss of us, I affirmed. She grinned.

The things we take for granted about ourselves that others have no way to know. Seeing each other’s creativity was what the evening was all about, and a good time was had by all.

Even if I forgot to bring my turtle chart and had to put that off for several more rows.

I wrote about wearing the huge sunflower gerdan in protest and solidarity the Sunday after the election.

What I didn’t mention was ABT coming up to me, wanting to know if that meant what she thought it did.

Support for Ukraine and made in Ukraine, yes, and I’d promised the woman who’d made it that I would wear it in celebration the day her country wins the war.

That meant a lot to ABT.

Two weeks ago I motioned her over at church. I asked her, Do you remember? and she went Oh, yeah!

I told her, I ordered something and this artist gifted me with the extra of a small gerdan–one that I already have one quite like. Is blue a good color, and would you like it? I pulled it out of its bag, its beads sparkling. (Not all do, but that one does.)

I knew, but didn’t say, how insane rents are in this area and how they can leave a young couple without a dime to spare. One of the perks of being older is getting to share. She got a little emotional at the sight as she took it in her hands.

I didn’t run into her last week so she made a point of finding me today. It matched her blue dress perfectly. It matched her and what she so hoped for for the sake of good people fighting for their freedom, and in the face of what our terrible leaders did to Zelensky this past week, wearing her support out loud felt imperative. And now she could.

And there I was, doing the same: that large loud sunflower was back on me.

Chile. Argentina. Uruguay. The Falklands. Antarctica. Penguins! Alpacas! It was their trip of a lifetime and having just come home she had pictures and yarn and I couldn’t wait to see them.

She described the Strait of Magellan where the Pacific meets the Atlantic as being so rough that the water broke some of the windows on the cruise ship.

Their tour was supposed to include visiting the Manos mill, but not everyone could manage the steps so they went instead to an alpaca farm and a more-accessible LYS that sold Manos. She gifted me with some yarn from both.

There’s a punk-rock-looking alpaca picture, too, if it’ll let me load it.

It was on their back patio right by the sliding door, protected by the awning, but still: relegated to outside and out of the way because they just were not using it any more at all. That’s when I knew it really was okay to accept it from them.

Ruth traded me that treadmill for a chocolate torte. Which I baked and then froze before we made the roughly two hour drive to her house near UC Davis so that it would be safe on arrival. She fed us lunch, we had a great visit, her puppy was cute, and then we used a wheelchair ramp to roll the treadmill into our minivan and drove it home.

I used it pretty much every single day for eleven years.

Then the belt jammed. Richard tested it recently and said the motor was slow now, too.

I was used to my walking time and I was going to get my walking time and since I can’t be in the sun I started simply pacing around the house for it–and doubled my time because now I wasn’t afraid of falling off that thing (once was enough.)

Maybe we could get a new belt.

Belts cost $99 for that old model, and quite possibly it still wouldn’t work.

Our city has twice a year Clean Up Days, where the usual one-tiny-can garbage restriction is lifted and you can put up to so much of things of this size, this size, this type and/or that.

Tomorrow is that day. We had talked about this for awhile, reluctantly.

But it took up so much space.

We both have temperamental backs and neither of us wanted to have to deal with it.

Yeah but I also had determination, so it started with me trying and failing and then him helping and then me wheeling it down the walkway once he got it past that doorway rise thingamagummy down there.

Gone. (Wait, I probably shouldn’t say that till the morning’s truck leaves.)

A little icing of the back, a bit of time doing stretches, and a whole lot of hope that tomorrow we’ll be fine, but man, it feels good to see that space empty. I expect the garbage folks will lift it with the truck’s mechanical arm, and wouldn’t the two year old next door have fun watching that?

It was a great gift and greatly appreciated and always will be and was much used. But it was its time. It is good to see its metals and plastics sent back into the recycle stream.

R is a teen, and she was giving one of the talks in church today.

Her family moved here six months ago, and where they’d moved from had had a group of Ukrainian refugees that had lived in underground bomb shelters for months. She found that included teenage girls who didn’t speak the language here and didn’t know anybody and they didn’t know if they’d ever be able to return. Their home had been bombed.

R’s mom, also reaching out, found that the girls had made a video. Of them doing normal, daily things. Brushing their teeth. Washing their hands.

Only, there was no water coming out, they were just play-acting it. And laughing and giggling and making sport of the absurdity of it all because what on earth else could you do about it, so, hey. Love the old home before you tell it goodbye maybe forever, and they did.

It made me sorry for those Ukrainians that R’s family had moved away from them, but as I said to her mom, From the first day of meeting your daughter I knew: she is one of those people that you instantly know that when you are with them you are in the presence of a friend.

Her parents taught her well.

So, too, did those Ukrainians.

The folks who bought the house next door a few months ago were thrilled at being offered an apricot tree.

Of the three Anya seedlings I had left, this one was as nearly perfectly balanced as you could ask for, a beautiful specimen. It’s the one that grew only a few inches tall its first year after its growth tips had died while we were out of town (the 4″ vitamin K-uptake-killing coir pot hindering leaf production did not help) but it was still alive so I kept watering it. Last year it hit 53″. It’ll be standing on its tiptoes to wave hi over the fence before you know it.

I explained that I’d chosen a smaller one for my yard for its late leafing-out and its slower growth for my limited space. I’d almost put the big one in anyway just because it’s such a perfect, healthy tree.

Big was fine with them. They knew exactly where they wanted to plant it, and when they told me, I told them that’s where the former owners had kept their garden for years. A very good sunny spot and it’ll have plenty of room. Very cool.

They told me of losing a plum tree to disease at their old house and how hard that had been.

Their big tree on the other side of the house, I told them, is a Santa Rosa plum that was there when the sellers’ parents had moved in about 60 years ago. They will have their plums back.

So now this tree has been dolly’d to its new home. And if by chance either theirs or mine ends up needing a pollinator–and having one always helps anyway–there will be one right on the other side of the fence, same mother tree but already clearly just different enough.

While the adults were talking, their little boy discovered our toy corner and in great excitement with each discovery arranged all our Hot Wheels into a curved-just-so traffic line behind the big yellow Tonka truck leading the way. And life is good.